The clocks have gone forward on hour! We’re now officially in British Summer Time (BST) and just to prove that the weather has a sense of humor, temperatures are supposed to dip below freezing tonight and stay low for most of next week.

This is not exactly ideal conditions for germinating grass seed. It’s pretty obvious we’re not going to have a fully recovered lawn for at least a month, if not two, and since we’re not prepared to deprive Beanie & Biggles of their play area for any longer, we’ve decided to “sacrifice” half of the garden. A fence will keep the lower half safe from Beagle interference for however long it takes the grass to regrow, and in the meantime our two hooligans can let off steam in the upper half, saving their sanity and ours. Later in the year we can either swap sides or fence off small areas for localized repairs.

I have to say that Beanie and Biggles seem quite pleased with our decision..

Even though they were given more or less free rein within their enclosure, they didn’t disturb the bare soil and seed much at all. I’ve noticed that our Beagles seem to have a talent for homing in on the things we don’t want them to mess with; the flip side is that if we’re not bothered about something, there’s a fair chance they’ll leave it alone. When I saw Biggles getting very interested in a graveled corner by the fence, I tried to make this Beagle intuition work for me;  I figured that if I didn’t react, maybe he’d just give it a couple of sniffs and move on.

Apparently the Beagle “sixth sense” also enables them to suss out when you’re trying to use reverse logic.